Around December 29, 1865

In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...

On December 29th 1865, Lafayette Rogan ventured out of the shoddily constructed prison barracks onto the frozen Mississippi River in the bitter cold. In the prison that December, Rogan had seen a side of the Civil War few remember now. He experienced almost a month of weather he described as miserable and intensely cold. To compound matters, adequate clothing and blankets were in short...

In January of 1857, a slave trader purchased an “enslaved” woman named Jane Morrison who was “of fair complexion, blue eyes, and flaxen hair.” After her escape, the next time he’d see her was in a Jefferson Parish courtoom where Alexina Morrison had filed suit against him. The suit declared that Alexina –not Jane— was white, mistakenly identified and mistakenly enslaved. In her petition,...

The Civil War was over, and it was time for those who led the South to be punished. The Norfolk Virginian reported on Monday, December 25, 1865, that the Union arrested "Raphael Semmes, late Admiral in the Confederate navy, and commander of the celebrated cruiser Alabama," with "a profound feeling of shame." The people of the South lamented the "unexpected arrest and immediate transfer...

On January 5, 1866, a sharecropping contract was made between W. R. Bath, a white land owner, and Ned Littlepage, a freedman. As seen in The Montgomery Advertiser, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands put out a series of regulations to govern the contracts made between a land owner and a sharecropper. By these rules, a contract for the labor in question had to be produced in writing...

Scalawag, a pejorative term not commonly used, became a commonly spoken slur used to describe Union sympathizers living in the South before, during, and after the Civil War. Some politicians, such as the one interviewed in an article in the January 7, 1866 edition of TheNew York Times, believed that Reconstruction...

The C.S.S. Shenandoah could be called the most dedicated Confederate Naval vessel of the Civil War or the tardiest. A lack of communication and the desire to see the South win the war led this ship to firing the war’s last shots. The C.S.S. Shenandoah was the only Confederate ship to circumnavigate the globe, on a mission to sink or capture any Union vessel it met. The...

The people of Norfolk were worried. According to the Norfolk Virginian, the Board of Health expected Asiatic cholera to spread to North America soon. The United States had seen cholera before. In 1832, it spread through New York and parts of Canada. It killed over ten thousand in New York, New Orleans, and St. Louis in 1849. Several thousands more were lost in Chicago in the 1850s....

Louisa Minor's life was changing all the time. More and more of her former slaves left her land as 1866 began. She felt sad to see people go whom she had known all her life. Louisa Minor mentioned in her diary the change in everyday life as the ex-slaves departed. She stated that though ice was available outside, no one brought it inside, because there were no servants left to do the work. She...

A small article on the front page of The Natchez Democrat on December 11, 1865, described a conflict between state militia and black freedmen almost two weeks earlier. The incident occurred as the militia attempted to search for arms in the black community Grenada, Mississippi. The militia seized "a large number of muskets, ammunition…from the negroes."